Recommendations

Please note, these recommendations do not match those of the Ethereum Foundation and their developers. You are encouraged to hear both sides and generate your own opinion.

If you are pro fork

Upgrade to geth 1.4.10 –support-hard-fork

If you are anti fork

Use NF1.4.9 (Do not upgrade to geth 1.4.10)

Do not use –fast sync after the hard fork has happened (block 1920000)

After block 1920010, check your chain to see if a hard fork spoof attack has occured.

You will know an attack occured if any of the blocks between 1920000 and 1920010 have an extradata field of dao-hard-fork.

If the spoof attack has not occurred…

You can safely upgrade to 1.4.10 –oppose-hard-fork and use –fast

If the spoof attack has occured…

We have entered the three-fork-scenario, and you can decide if you want to be on NF1.4.9 or NF1.4.10.

On NF1.4.9 you cannot safely use –fast until either the chains converge, or a fix is pushed

On NF1.4.10 you can safely use –fast, however it is less secure (by miner hashpower) than NF1.4.9

Why is this so complicated?

Geth 1.4.10 imposes a soft fork on all users, including those who use the –oppose-dao-fork. The Ethereum Foundation developers have made the assumption that the hashpower behind NF1.4.10 will be greater than NF1.4.9 and therefore there will be no network split. I contend that is a risky assumption to make, especially since the fork was unveiled two days in advance of when it needs to be rolled out. We know a large number of nodes are still running months-old versions of geth and have no way of knowing in advance the relative miner adoption between the 3 potential chains.

–fast fixes

One of the main reasons cited for the soft fork is that it’ll protect users syncing with the --fast flag. I contend there are other better solutions

Use a merkle proof of block 1920000 to check the balance of the dao contract

Use a centralized oracle server

Simply warn users that --fast is insecure during hard forks, and they should wait till 1.4.11 until a blockhash can be hardcoded.